Entity relationship (ER) graph data is ubiquitous. Social networks such as Yahoo! 360 and Orkut are essentially ER graphs with entities (such as persons, communities, organizations, blogs, etc.) and relationships there between (e.g., such as having or sharing friend relationships, participating as members, working on projects, authoring articles, etc.). As another example, movie and entertainment data provided by the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) site can also be represented as an ER graph.
To identify meaningful information, some techniques provide that the ER may be simulated as an electric network. A hypothetical voltage, say one volt, may be placed between the two entities. The hypothetical voltage triggers a hypothetical electric current in the simulated electric network. Analytical or numerical calculations may be performed to determine a few particular paths between the two entities that carry the largest amounts of electric current between the two entities, as compared with the remaining electric current carried by other paths.
The problem with these techniques is that paths of an ER, as represented by a hypothetical electric network and as identified to be electrically significant, may not be truly important in reality. For example, a person may work with two other people on two entirely different documents. One of the two documents may be an extremely important document that requires extensive and intimate cooperation between the person and one of the two other people. On the other hand, the other document may be relatively unimportant that requires only relatively casual and informal cooperation between the person and the other of the two people. Since the person is linked with the two other people through one document (whether it is important or not), the electric network simulation would identify both relationships as extremely significant, but which significances in reality are quite different in degree.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.